Analysing Biopower And Agency Linked To Euthanasia Philosophy Essay

Analysing Biopower And Agency Linked To Euthanasia Philosophy Essay Human life can be perceived as a way of being that ensures autonomy upon the physical body. However, state authority, surveillance and law are moderating this individual freedom and moral decision-making. Nowadays, euthanasia remains a highly controversial and sensitive medical and ethical issue. My research and final thesis for the master will focus on the narratives of people, residing in houses for the elderly in Antwerp, Belgium. Emphasis is placed on whether upcoming media interest in euthanasia influences elderly thoughts and decision making regarding assisted suicide. Wishes about end-of-life decisions, opinions of relatives and law interpretations of medical practitioners are being investigated in this study. And finally the way government’s authority influences people’s agency in end-of-life decision making. With this paper, I intend to widen my knowledge of two main anthropological topics linked to the subject of euthanasia, namely biopower and agency. Biopol itics concern the political implications of social and biological facts and phenomena, with political choice and action directly afflicting all aspects of human life. Agency, on the other hand, can be seen as an alternative attempt to maintain autonomy in one’s own life and death, under the influence of the state’s disciplining interference. Both forms of power are studied in this paper, and their interrelationship is critically viewed. Keywords: Biopolitics, Agency, Power, Health, Ethics 2. The history of biopower In Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics (Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979), an analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism as forms of biopolitics is presented. According to Foucault, biopower can be perceived as a technology of power, intending to manage individuals as a group. This political technology differentiates because of its ability to control populations as a whole, and is thus essential to the development of modern capitalism (Fouca ult, 2008). This shift from the managing and micro-controlling of individuals to disciplining a population emerged in the eighteenth-century. Even though this seems as an opportunity to gain more natural rights and liberty for individuals, this liberal government no longer limits state power because of the incompatible tension between freedom and security (Foucault, 2008, McSweeney, 2010). As Foucault argued, liberalism concerns the biopolitical. For liberalism promotes an imagined self-governing of life through a certain capture and disciplining of natural forces of aggression and desire within the framework of a cultural game, governed by civil conventions and instituted laws (Foucault, 2004). In this conception, ‘life is as much of a cultural construct as is law, although the naturalness of life, thought of as innately self-regulating, is always insinuated. Both in economics and in politics, liberalism rejoice in an order that is supposed to emerge naturally from the clash of passions themselves (Milbank, 2008: 2).’ Rabinow and Rose seek to enlighten the developments in Foucault’s concept of biopower, which ‘serves to bring into view a field comprised of more or less rationalized attempts to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence (Rabinow, 2006: 196-197).’ Foucault distinguishes two poles of biopower: the first one focuses on an anatomo-politics of the human body, seeking to maximize its forces and integrate it into efficient systems. The second pole entails biopolitics of the population, focusing on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanisms of life: birth, morbidity, mortality and longevity (Rose, 2007: 53). Thus, according to Rabinow and Rose, ‘we can use the term ‘biopolitics’ to embrace all the specific strategies and contestations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality; over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and practice s of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious (Rabinow, 2006: 197).’